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Updated: June 25, 2025
The early pioneers who planted civilization on the Watauga, the Holston, the Kentucky, the Cumberland, had not much broad learning they would not have been worse if they had had more but they had courage, they were trained in self-reliance, virile common sense, and good judgment, they had inherited the instinct and capacity of self-government, they were religious, with all their coarseness they had the fundamental elements of nobility, the domestic virtues, and the public spirit needed in the foundation of states.
Years afterward, speaking of the scene as it then broke upon him, Robertson said, "It seemed to me the Promised Land." As the explorers prepared to descend into the valley, they noticed a few miles away, at the north, a slight smoke curling up from among the trees near the banks of what is now known as Boone's Creek, a small tributary of the Watauga.
The borderers of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the little settlements at Watauga and Boonesboro, maintained a heroic defense against the Indians, who were paid by General Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit, to wage a war of massacre and pillage on the frontier.
If this experience proves his lack of the hunter's instinct and the woodsman's resourcefulness which Boone possessed, it proves also his special qualities of perseverance and endurance which were to reach their zenith in his successful struggle to colonize and hold western Tennessee. He returned to Watauga in the following spring with his family and a small group of colonists.
Like Robertson, Sevier hastened home and removed his whole family, including his wife and children, his parents and his brothers and sisters, to this new haven of freedom at Watauga. The friendship formed between Robertson and Sevier in these first years of their work together was never broken, yet two more opposite types could hardly have been brought together.
About 1769 young Sevier joined an exploring and emigrating party to the Holston river, in East Tennessee, then a part of North Carolina. He assisted in erecting the first fort on the Watauga river, where he, his father, his brother Valentine, and others settled.
"You and me was raised on mountain scenery, as a body may say. I should think we'd both had enough of it to last us." "But this this is different," groped Johnnie, trying to explain the emotions that possessed her. "Look at that big settlement over yon. I reckon it's a city. It must be Watauga. It looks like the the mansions of the blest, in the big Bible that preacher Drane has, down at Bledsoe."
Early in 1772 Virginia made a treaty with the Cherokee Nation, which established as the boundary between them a line running west from White Top Mountain in latitude 36 degrees 30'. Immediately afterwards the agent of the British Government among the Cherokees ordered the Watauga settlers to instantly leave their lands.
The few who came to the settlements were friendly, and, after smoking and eating with the settler, they would go away, grasping his hand and assuring him that the red man was his brother. Those were halcyon days; but Satan entered into Paradise, and one of his legitimate children, a Scotchman named Cameron, in the early spring of 1772, invaded this Eden on the Watauga.
"Who may he be!" cried Tom; "Captain John Sevier, king of the border, and I reckon the best man to sweep out redskins in the Watauga settlements." "Do you know him?" said she. "I was chose as one of his scouts when we fired the Cherokee hill towns last summer," said Tom, with pride. "Thar was blood and thunder for ye!
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